Assassin’s Creed Syndicate will be releasing on PC worldwide on November 19, less than a month after the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game.
The team in Kiev is working to accommodate the myriad PC setups as they optimize the game. Kovalev tells us that PC requirements are still being finalized, and said that there will be no locks on the game as far as framerate and resolution goes. The recommended system requirements will target 1080p and 30 FPS.
They shouldn’t have said 30 FPS. Now the framerate police will go rabid and tell everyone how much Ubisoft sucks, regardless of how well the game actually runs. Sigh.
Unfortunately, from the preview build I played last week, there’s little evidence to suggest it has eradicated all of its major problems. In fact, if I were Ubisoft, I’d be seriously considering a delay.
Syndicate, right from the main menu, feels instantly like Unity. On PS4 (the build I played at the event) it has the same issues hitting 30fps, with constant stuttering and a wildly fluctuating frame rate, as well as the same 900p resolution (Ubisoft is yet to confirm the resolution, but it certainly didn’t look 1080p). There’s demonstrable input lag. It looks great, as long as you’re not moving too much. Now, this is a preview build, and the game is still a month away from launch. But there is a sense of history repeating here, as these same issues were present in Unity’s preview builds, just as they were in its eventual release.
On a technical front, then, it does not bode well. For a series that is literally about learning from the mistakes of the past, Assassin’s Creed doesn’t seem to be heeding any of its own advice.
On the flipside, Eurogamer says it’s running great.
The silver lining from last year is that Ubisoft gained plenty of feedback on how it needed to improve and, happily, from the sections of Syndicate we played it feels like this has to some extent filtered through. It’s clear that Syndicate is an Assassin’s Creed game, but it’s also clear that another year of technical knowledge and fine-tuning for the game’s engine has produced a far better and more stable result. In the early build we played, Syndicate ran smoothly at all times.
“We’ve taken the feedback seriously,” Côté concludes. “We’ve heard the fans and are doing everything we can to improve the experience. We’ve taken a humble approach to designing Syndicate, which is I think indicative of the team back in Ubisoft Quebec. We want to build a game which makes Assassin’s Creed fans happy.” Key to that, he says, is that everyone should “have fun on day one. The game needs to be performing and as bug free as possible at launch.”
Aye, thats totally not what I wanted to hear. Don’t most people agree on what is the highlights of the series? As in Brotherhood and Black Flag? More of that please, but nice that someone here is taking the bullet for us!
Most trustworthy reviews seem quite positive about AC: Syndicate so far. They praise the quality of missions, technical stability, and the cart/carriage gameplay. Many reviews note that the step back from Unity and elimination of multiplayer seem to have allowed the team return to the Brotherhood days.
Also, Anita Sarkeesian, (yes, the Feminist Frequency person) liked it.
A humanized playable female protagonist isn’t the only thing that distinguishes Syndicate from its predecessors. We meet an amusing cast of historical characters such as Karl Marx, Florence Nightingale, and a charming Alexander Graham Bell, but Evie and Jacob’s allies also include Henry Green, a British Indian Assassin, and Ned Wynert, a successful thief who just happens to be a trans man and no one in the world thinks anything of it. These characters play supporting or minor roles but their inclusion is notable. While it might seem “unrealistic” to imagine women, people of colour and trans folks who are treated and respected as full human beings in 1868, realism is not really the goal in a game where Assassins and Templars have been waging a centuries’ old war over artifacts created by an ancient civilization, and where you can leap from the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral into a pile of leaves and walk away unharmed. The inclusion of these characters works not because of realism but because of believability and internal consistency. That believability is a result of the developers’ conscious decision to make the presence of these characters normalized and respected by everyone else in the game.
Throughout this world, I quickly noticed a significant number of female combatants goading you into battle with the same tenacity and strength as their male counterparts. There are many valid concerns around portrayals of violence against women in games because too often such scenarios trivialize the real-world epidemic of gendered abuse. But Syndicate avoids this problem by framing the female enemies as competent, capable, and practically dressed.
Yeah, the reviews I’ve skimmed (and a few minutes of a stream I watched yesterday) did actually get me to wishlist this on Steam. I don’t think I’ll grab it the day it comes out or anything (not with Divinity Enhanced Edition and Fallout 4 right around then, I believe, or near enough as to not matter) but it’s something I’d like to play at some point, having really enjoyed the pirate one quite a lot (which the only previous AC game I got into/completed). This looks really cool, actually, and I love the setting and the setup from what I’ve seen.
The only thing holding me back is the fact that my last AC game was also Brotherhood. I don’t care about the story but I am concerned that if I skip games in the series, my plan to go back will be thwarted by gameplay refinements that I’ll miss as I move backwards in the series. That’s why I try to stick with playing them in order, for gameplay reasons, not story reasons.
You’re hurting yourself - if you play em in order, don’t play em all :(
I would go 1, Brotherhood, Black Flag then potentially Syndicate. Playing the ones which are over similar just makes you hate the repetitive content. And playing 3 made me hate America.
Hmmm, interesting theory. Here is what I thought of them so far:
AC1 - Amazing. Such a revelation. Plus in retrospect, it’s 11 hour length was fucking perfect.
AC2 - Terrible for most of the game. I slogged through it in a year, but hated my time with it. And it was too goddamned long.
AC: Brotherhood - Loved it. I loved Rome through and through. Good thing too, because the game was once again soooo long, but I didn’t mind.
AC: Revelations - Stalled out, because using the new gameplay systems like bombs is kind of complex and confusing and I need more practice.
I always thought the best solution to them being overly similar was to put some distance between playing each iteration. Like I started Revelations too soon after Brotherhood, so I decided to put it on hold for a couple of years until I was ready to come back to it.
Of course, the problem with my plan is that putting a two year gap between games means that Ubisoft has already released two more games in the meantime, which is why I’m so far behind now.
So maybe your plan is better Alistair. I do own Black Flag. Maybe I should skip straight to that.
